This trio set from three of New York’s most imaginative left-field musicians – Tim Berne drummer/vibraphonist Ches Smith, pianist Craig Taborn and tone-bending viola player Mat Maneri – displays such an unusual balance of compositional tautness (Smith wrote all the pieces) and spontaneity that assigning it to any jazz, improv or contemporary classical box is impossible. The nine-minute title track is typical, in the explicitness of the opening bell chime, Taborn’s show-and-hide chordal pulse, Maneri’s graceful ascents and a heated finale sprayed with brusque percussion rumbles. Cryptic viola melodies shadowed by rolling piano figures accelerate to frisky dances, stern tom-tom grooves stalk alongside intimate piano-viola dialogues, the fiddle equivalent of Jan Garbarek’s long sax outbreaths curl across dark landscapes before storms break.
This is the incredible story of Uther Pendragon, a lost psychedelic band from San Francisco whose music has remained buried until now. Formed in the Bay Area in 1966 as a teen garage group called Blue Fever, Uther Pendragon lasted from 1966 until 1978. During that time, the band went through different names and phases, as their music evolved from garage to psychedelia to hard rock, but the core of the band always remained the same: Mark Lightcap (rhythm guitar, vocals), Bruce Marelich (lead guitar, vocals), and Martin Espinosa (bass, vocals). After finding their ultimate drummer in Mike Beers, the group finally settled on the Uther Pendragon name in the early '70s. But despite being active for all that time and recording at numerous studios (including their own in Palo Alto), Uther Pendragon never released any recordings…
The psychedelic southern rock band DeWolff presents on February 5 next year their latest album Roux-Ga-Roux. The album appears on the own Electrosaurus Records in collaboration with Suburban Records. It is the sixth studio album by the band. DeWolff are a psychedelic rock band from the Netherlands’ deep south, formed in 2007 by brothers Pablo & Luka van de Poel and Robin Piso. When their psychedelic yet hard rocking, self-titled EP was released in 2008 it immediately conquered the hearts of rock music lovers all across the country and in December 2008 the band played their first show at Paradiso, a legendary venue in Amsterdam. The release of their 2009 debut album “Strange Fruits and Undiscovered Plants” was followed by a successful tour through the Netherlands and Germany.
Since Hammond B-3 specialist Lonnie Smith left Blue Note in the '70s, the largely self-taught musician has added the "Dr." to his name, adopted a traditional Sikh turban as a distinctive, if enigmatic style choice (it's unclear if he follows the religion), and continued to release a steady stream of highly regarded soulful well before the 21st century came around. With 2016's Evolution, Smith returns to Blue Note, his first studio album for the label since 1970's Drives. Produced by Don Was, Evolution is one of the most robust albums of his career. Where his previous few albums found him working in a trio format, on Evolution, Was surrounds Smith with various small group configurations featuring a bevy of post-bop, funk, and soul-ready musicians including drummers Jonathan Blake and Joe Dyson, guitarist Jonathan Kreisberg, trumpeters Keyon Harrold and Maurice Brown, and others…